Sure, the Rob Portman rule. What's really striking to me is the degree to which on economic issues there's strong solidarity on the right -- blowing up ACA via the mandates is an unspeakably terrible idea for American business, but Republicans are all for it anyway, because tribal identity now demands that they can't get off the train.

While I can fully understand not wanting to read books written by an idiot, I also think that you can learn a great deal from idiots. Nothing really internalizes a lesson like watching somebody else really fuck up.

3: my future mother-in-law said that once to try to be comforting. I said that I found that hard to believe because of all the trauma of my clients' lives, but that it might be a useful thing to think as a way of getting through the day.

What I wanted to say was. "YES, and if I hit you right now, it will because you said such a grotesquely offensive and stupid thing to say."

The just-world hypothesis really is the nucleus of the conservative worldview, isn't it? Not only do conservatives gleefully embrace the victim-blaming aspect of it, but it also underlies their idolization of the super-wealthy. They are successful because they deserve it, not because the system is rigged in favor of those who have advantages to begin with. And every rags-to-riches story becomes anecdotal support for this worldview; the fact that it is possible for somone to pull themself up by their bootstraps only proves that the rest of the poor people just aren't trying hard enough.

I'm totally the wrong person to ask, as I am aware of internet traditions only. I think it's intelligible enough, but if anyone gives you shit about it you can just point at the "fuck you" part and glare at them.

Beleiving that life is inevitably unfair can make for a horrible outlook as well. Fatalism about large-scale suffering or injustice is also not appealing.

How to balance sweeping general beliefs with at least decency in ordinary life is tricky. There are lots of general beliefs that lead to idiotic voting choices and stupid assumptions about events outside daily life.

11: of course, it would be bad if people were convinced that they were so worthless that they didn't deserve anything good. You want some kind of balance so that people actually try to do stuff in their lives.

The just-world hypothesis really is the nucleus of the conservative worldview, isn't it? Not only do conservatives gleefully embrace the victim-blaming aspect of it, but it also underlies their idolization of the super-wealthy. They are successful because they deserve it, not because the system is rigged in favor of those who have advantages to begin with. And every rags-to-riches story becomes anecdotal support for this worldview; the fact that it is possible for somone to pull themself up by their bootstraps only proves that the rest of the poor people just aren't trying hard enough.

I find going to the local Protestant church really beneficial, as a reminder of moral principles, like the classic "If not for the grace of God, there go I" and Jesus's messages about generosity and inclusiveness. It's a real tragedy that because of the Republican Party, the role of Christianity in our public consciousness for my whole life has been to defend selfishness, imperialism and hatred of outsiders.

14 makes an excellent point. Believing that everyone gets in this life exactly what they deserve tends to create moral monsters, but believing that the opposite leads to paralysis. But "sometimes things are fair, sometimes they're not" doesn't make a good slogan, really.

Job bothers me for the suggestion that children are fungible. The house collapsed while they were partying, and all ten of your children were killed, but it's okay, because by the end, God gives you new children.

The interpretation of Job I'm familiar with believes the "happy ending" to be a later addition, also the fatuous younger comforter who seems to prevail. This interpretation holds that the uncompromising version was too challenging to be left alone.

32: How else would it have ended? Job continues to curse God, and God says, "Well, if you had taken it back, I was going to give you all your stuff back + brand-new wife & kiddies, but now I'm going to leave you to die in the gutter".
Job dies. The End.

A dollop of empathy is the difference between sociopathy and not, right? Also, American Christianity has, at least since the antebellum era, featured struggles between apostles of selfishness and selflessness.

From link in 39 He has been faithful in all of his duties to the gods. He speculates that perhaps what is good to man is evil to the gods and vice versa. He is ultimately delivered from his sufferings.

I am feeling sort of kneejerk anti-Christian lately, which I realize is unfair and unkind, but I live and go to church with people who (to varying degrees) really believe it's Satan making bad things happen in their lives and God who's behind much-needed checks that arrive earlier than expected and so on. But many of them are also leading harder lives than I am and I kind of feel like I don't have much room to judge people who are going through Job-type stuff and still believe. I still find some of the beliefs and expressions of them odious and part of the reason I go to church is to counterbalance it if the girls hear that, but I'm glad these believers have something, I guess.

But Gilgamesh is pretty subtle. I think that this was a tradition that took poetry and written expression fairly seriously. I'm not that interested in a single-sentence summary on Wikipedia by someone who doesn't read the language.

Vaguely on topic, this thread is reminding me that I found this book really fascinating when I read it years ago. Dualism is such a handy solution to the "Why do bad things happen?" question that I'm surprised it's not more popular.

39.1 - My favorite part of Job is where God does the "You couldn't possibly understand because look how much bigger I am" speech, even though we know damn well exactly what his motives are in the book. (He is doing it to win a bet.) Seeing people refer to that bit as if it were a "God's ways are mysterious so we should trust in him that things will eventually work out" is totally bizarre but not uncommon.

Also I wouldn't get to cheerful about the Belief in a Just World stuff happening mostly to conservatives. The effect isn't limited to explicit victim blaming, but a general sort of degrading of the victim (including, for example, thinking they are less physically attractive - seriously). It absolutely affects you even when you aren't being an asshole authoritarian, or at least it's very likely to. If it doesn't you're just set up in another trap, which is that the less inclined towards that kind of reaction the less inclined towards actually helping people when you have the chance. (And doing it less is also linked to various sorts problems in life - because that belief is built right into our sense of agency, especially dealing with long term projects.) So really you're awful either way.

Also the effect of a belief in a just world is somewhat weakened (though not enough to be comfortable with it) by a strong belief in an eternal reward/punishment, probably due to it alleviating some of the internal conflicts involved. But it doesn't necessarily affect the motivation to help out or alleviate injustices.

Also I wouldn't get to cheerful about the Belief in a Just World stuff happening mostly to conservatives.

Yeah. My FB feed is pretty solidly left-of-center now, and last month a friend who survived cancer posted this article with an observation about how many people had basically asked her what she did wrong that gave her cancer, and how many other cancer patients were beating themselves up over it. A friend of hers corroborated: "People feel the need to ask. I MUST have done something..." This shit is close to being secular.

Even though the psychological defense mechanism he describes makes intuitive sense I was really glad to see it described that baldly because it provides a good hook to reach for when I feel myself sliding down that mental path.

64 - It won't help you as much as you think. I mean, we tend to use the phrase 'victim blaming', but the phenomenon is way more inclusive than that. Actual blaming is kind of a mid-point, actually. People tend to go (going on to the next when the answer is "no"): (1) Can I fix* this? (2) Did that person do something to bring this on themselves? (3) They're just a lesser sort of person.

And (3) isn't necessarily a conscious reaction in the slightest: I mean, sometimes it is, but like I said above it also shows up in all sorts of weird unconscious places like thinking someone did worse on a test than you saw them do, that they aren't as attractive** as you'd otherwise think, and so on.

*Important thing to know about human psychology here: somewhat ameliorate counts as a "no". We aren't set up for a range of answers, deep down, no matter how willing we are to say that there's a spectrum/we just need to do our best/every solution is imperfect/etc.
**No really, as in, statistically measurable effect here. (Usually by running the same experiment twice with the roles reversed between two experimenters. The victimized one ends up being rated less attractive no matter which person it was.)

Isn't that one of the points of Thinking Fast and Slow (which I haven't read yet) -- that it's possible to consciously override the quick-twitch parts of the brain, but it takes effort only works when you focus on it.

Sure, but this isn't just a quick-twitch thought process: it has more to do with general cognitive dissonance problems. So slow thinking is going to make a difference in how the reaction shows up in some people (and how baldly it's stated), but not in it being there one way or another.

About Job: Depending on your tolerance for Ursula Le Guin, you may find interesting the play that she includes in Always Coming Home, which is like the Book of Job only with more despair and a worse set of comforters. It starts on page 227 of this google books thing which I can't link to quite right.

Sure, but this isn't just a quick-twitch thought process: it has more to do with general cognitive dissonance problems.

Okay, I buy that as well.

Even if you stop and think it through if your conclusion is, "the world is horribly unfair, and I can't do anything to ameliorate this instance of unfairness" that isn't a very comfortable or stable mental resting point -- there's a strong incentive to come up with some reason why that isn't a complete description and why there are other mitigating factors as well.

In fact it seems like it's very similar* to the fact that recognizing that one is being defensive about something doesn't stop the feelings of defensiveness.

72: Absolutely - but what I was pointing out earlier is that being less of an asshole that way comes with costs of its own. It's not just a matter of some people being nastier than others: people less subject to the effect are nastier in other ways (including, closer to the end of the spectrum, ones that seriously hurt them as well).

I think you are doing Harold Kushner a disservice in the OP. He's a Conservative rabbi who had a lifelong belief in a just and loving God that was challenged by the death of his son, and was forced to re-examine both his beliefs and broader cultural beliefs about the nature of God. His chapter on the book of Job is quite good.

By the way, the analysis above that the final ending is tacked on is incorrect, according to both Kushner and another OT scholar I know. Rather, the prose part of the book (the very beginning and the final end) were almost certainly the original story in its entirety - a folk tale about a man who had faith in God, got tested by this weird divine bet, lost everything but kept his faith without complaining, so God made it all up to him in the end by giving him fungible kids and camels and all. The middle part of the book was basically written by someone who's reaction was "this is BS," and gave us a Job who argues back against the cultural beliefs (represented by Job's friends) that this must somehow be his fault, and ultimately gets to debate the justice of his situation with God himself. And then there's the Elihu speech, which many scholars think is a later addition by someone who disagreed with the theological viewpoint presented by that author.

Kushner wrestles with the issue of theodicy not as a scholar presenting an abstract argument, but as a grieving father trying to make sense of it all, and ultimately concludes that he has to give up his belief in the omnipotence of God in order to continue believing in a loving personal God who can connect with him in his grief. And he argues that there is room in the conclusion of Job's confrontation (in which God doesn't seem to reply to Job directly, but just seems to argue that he's the Creator, so there) for this interpretation - that God is basically saying "Who the fuck are you to think you know what I can and can't do? You think it was easy creating the world like this, and I should have done it better? I'm just doing the best I can, dude, and we've got the world as it is to deal with, injustices and all. But you get points for having the guts to challenge me on this, and your friends who would defend me with those crappy arguments are the real idiots."

He's a Conservative rabbi who had a lifelong belief in a just and loving God that was challenged by the death of his son, and was forced to re-examine both his beliefs and broader cultural beliefs about the nature of God.

The death of someone else's child never troubled him in quite the same way, for the first 35 years of his life.

I'm not going to fault someone for having their worldview shook up when their child dies. But I'm having trouble cutting him slack for being a rabbi and never questioning that the death of a child might threaten his worldview.

I had an insight into this when I was having one of my usual converations with my stepdaughter about Bugs Bunny. She was asking me question after question about Bugs "Why is he so cool?" "Why is he so brave?" "Why is he so confident?" and then it occured to me that the reason Bugs is so confident is because he knows His Creator loves him too much to let anything really bad happen to him. Is that how truly religious people go through life? Until God proves them wrong?

I dunno. One of my conclusions from the last three years, in which I did lose two children, is that empathy doesn't extend well. Like, I am really good on the topic of babyloss, but I still can't empathize on the death of a parent. Further, really loving and aware people did a good job of not being assholes and saying the right things. But later it was clear that they had no idea how deep the depths were. I came away thinking that there's stuff that you simply can't understand without going through it. (You can learn good manners, though, and that'll get you 95% of the way through.)

I also came to believe that people truly have no imagination (or willingness to imagine) about how bad bad things can be. One facet of thinking that 'god only gives you what you can handle' is having no idea how much there might be to handle.

I think if you find it easy to believe that it's impossible to for someone to know what it's like to lose a child, it's not so surprising to find it easy to believe that having lost a child, someone might radically reconceive their values. I imagine he'd thought about the problem of evil before; he might not have realized that the standard answers didn't help.

80: As a developer of complex software, I can totally relate to that image of God. It's a lot easier to critique what the software is doing from the outside, than to wrestle with all the complex constraints involved in creating the stuff in the first place. And developers are constantly getting surprised by unexpected consequences of other design decisions when they finally get to see the software in operation.

I find god only gives you what you can handle enraging. I guess it's supposed to be reassuring.

82 reminds me of a recent president. Assume for a minute that he actually believed that he had received some sort of divine instruction to invade Iraq. Would not the difficulties experienced in the 2004-2007 time frame look like divine challenges to his commitment to his faith.

I also came to believe that people truly have no imagination (or willingness to imagine) about how bad bad things can be

I also wonder if to some extent certain kinds of religious belief hamper imagination. I mean, I can't count how many times I've heard "I can't imagine how I could have gotten through [X] without God!" and my response is always, "Well, can you imagine a God who might have given you the imagination to manage???" but so far I've never said it out loud. It's really an empathy failure of a sort, I guess, and I'm sure all of it is some kind of self-protection thing, but I'm not very patient with it.

And the OP has been pretty much my exact experience in dealing with the conservatives in my life -- that is, they are conservatives either *until* their son comes out to them, and now they realize they're for social justice; or their pro-life *until* their daughter (who is a fragile diabetic) needs an abortion when she's 20 weeks pregnant, or she's going to stroke out and die; and all of a sudden they're pro-choice and pro-women's rights.

And yet, many of them, only in private and with me. This really chaps my hide, I gotta say. I know it's Arkansas, and I know there's a price they'll pay if they admit to what they (now) believe in public. But holy hell.

I get so many people (for instance) sending me private messages and links on FB, asking if I would post this story or that. "I can't do it," they say. "My family (or my pastor, or my husband, or wevs) would kill me. Would you mind?"

So most of Harrison, Arkansas (or wherever) keeps sailing on, thinking everyone around them is still a Far-Right, anti-Choice, racist, homophobe. And there we are.

85, 86: Megan and Cala are quite wise here. One of the things Kushner mentions in the book is that it was only after he started to share his experience as a fellow grieving parent that other people became more willing to share the depth of their feelings about the insufficiency of the conventional answers for them. He mentions one woman whose response to someone telling her "God never gives you more than you can handle," was to think "If I had only been a weaker person, my son would still be alive."

89.2: Also, unfortunately, "go in sackcloth and on your knees to repent" had fallen out of the vocabulary of handling it.

Whole Foods & the belief in just cancer irk me personally because it's a selfish perversion of the "live simply"/Clean Water Act earth mother technocrat tradition I was brought up in. When the libertarians seduce a chunk of threatened US liberals into their goddamned fatuous Fronde it will be Whole Foods in the lead.

Trying to search for things about Job is really annoying... As far as I can work out, it's generally agreed that the poetry and prose sections were written by different people (and probably the poetry was written by two people, with Elihu added later) but its much less clear which was added to which. Certainly the poetic portion presumes that readers know the basic outline of the story, but it doesn't necessarily mean that it was written to go with this exact prose version of the story. In fact, it could be that a later editor (who didn't write any of it) put an existing prose description around an existing poem. But again I'm having trouble finding a really good description of the situation.

I think grief can lead one to have less empathy. You may go through thinking as other's problems as trivial compared to yours, and you may take the attitude that your problems are so special that others cannot understand what you are going through. I wish it was never this way.

76: Lessen our chances, sure, but shit still happens. And acai berries aren't a miracle cure. It also seems tied up with the attitudes of some of the anti-vaxx people. I can't quite articulate why yet.

But I'm having trouble cutting him slack for being a rabbi and never questioning that the death of a child might threaten his worldview.

So you really want to attribute his thought process to some kind of deep character flaw that he has (which would never possibly afflict you), and not to something general about the human condition and our ability to empathize with each other?

According to the BBC, 2/3 of cancer are caused by random chance, and can't be attributed to lifestyle/environmental factors. Of the remaining 1/3 that can be attributed to external factors approximately 60% of those are caused by smoking.

So, if I'm reading it correctly, every other lifestyle and environmental cause combined accounts for ~1/7 of cancer cases. A significant number but also a clear minority.

My poor sweetheart believed more in the just world than I did and it hurt him a lot during our losses. I found that having a statistician for a mother helped me tremendously. Rare events happen! Here we are, part of a large population, representing that.

So you really want to attribute his thought process to some kind of deep character flaw that he has (which would never possibly afflict you), and not to something general about the human condition and our ability to empathize with each other?

On this one particular topic, yes I am drawing a bright line. On many other moral matters, maybe I'm the ignorant asshole and he's the gracious blogger. But on "why do bad things happen to good people?" and "Is there a conflict between an omniscient God and a loving God?" I submit the age of accountability to be age 25. ESPECIALLY if your profession is thinking about hard things like this and comforting grieving people.

One of my conclusions from the last three years, in which I did lose two children, is that empathy doesn't extend well. Like, I am really good on the topic of babyloss, but I still can't empathize on the death of a parent.

But this isn't the issue. I absolutely do not know what it's like to lose a baby; I just need to believe other people when they say it's the worst thing in the world. This is the Republican personal-crisis thing - they can't possibly imagine that medical bills might stack up, until it actually happens to them. Then they convert on that one issue, but can't possibly imagine that parents whose kids have been shot might have a point about gun control. Or whatever.

So you really want to attribute his thought process to some kind of deep character flaw that he has (which would never possibly afflict you), and not to something general about the human condition and our ability to empathize with each other?

I think that attribution might not be too unreasonable. I mean, it's one thing for someone really incurious to maybe get through a lot of their life believing that blah-blah-god's-plan stuff is a consolation to people who have suffered a massive loss and discovering later that it really isn't at all. (I still think that's bad, but...) It's another thing to have that realization even though part of your job involves consoling people who have suffered massive losses (and usually in just that way). That's where the failure really shows up, or at least really bad one.

One problem I tend to have with people like that rabbi is that I can't help but feel like that particular kind of ignorance is an intentional one. It could be that it's simply a lack of a basic cognitive faculty like empathy, but I doubt it. I mean, it's not just that 'there's a just omnipotent god etc. etc.' is part of the basic elements of the religion, but in my experience 'the fact that God has a plan and loves everyone and just trust him and things will be ok' is, if anything, a larger part of it. And that's the part that ends up in real trouble because it doesn't even come close to being an accurate description of how things feel in the world.

There's not just a failure to see something, in other words, but a refusal to see it* even when it's right in front of them in the form of someone suffering a really horrible loss/experience/etc. And in at least a few cases (but I think this is pretty common) I've seen people hit that realization in their own lives and then quickly forget it as hard as they can, at least when something equivalently nasty happens to someone they know.

*Just like I tend to think that about conservatives when they display little to no empathy for various circumstances. It's not that the answer wasn't right in front of them, it's that once they've experienced it they really can't deny that it's there anymore without either giving up something really massive about their lives or just openly refusing to interact with the world around them.**
**Which you can absolutely see people do in these kind of circumstances as well.

In my limited scholarly experience the rabbinical tradition is much better about recognizing the limits of the solution of the intellectual problem of evil as a solution to the practical pastoral problem (i.e., how to respond with compassion to someone who is suffering) than is some of the Christian tradition.

So, I find it completely plausible that someone could believe that he has an intellectual solution (even if he recognizes that the time of grief is not the time to pulling out the propositions), only to find that personal experience wipes out any hope of the pastoral solution, too. That doesn't really strike me as a failure of imagination, unless you want to claim that at age 25 one can perfectly imagine every life experience, in which case, I submit that the failure of imagination is probably not on the part of the rabbi.

Fortunately, the bit is included on the Look Inside bit on Amazon in the first chapter.

He calls himself a "young, inexperienced rabbi" at that point, when he gets his son's diagnosis, which I suppose does exonerate him. That's basically all I'm accusing him of being.

Like most people, I was aware of the human tragedies that darkened the landscape - the young people who died in car crashes,...[etc]... But that awareness never drove me to wonder about God's justice, or to question His fairness. I assumed that He knew more about the world than I did.

and

Tragedies like this were supposed to happen to selfish, dishonest people whom I, as a rabbi, would then try to comfort by assuring them of God's forgiving love. How could it be happening to me, to my son, if what I believed about the world was true?

You have the opposite problem for some liberals. They think that if they vote Democratic and pay taxes, then they shouldn't need to advocate for any issues. Some people can be remarkably misinformed about what is available and figure that the government will take care of it. It means that they do very little to help people outside of their family.

My godmother is sort of like this. She knows kind of that health care sucked, but she figured that Massachusetts was a liberal state, so everything was hunky dory. She was also insulated from it by working for a university with an in-house HMO--all your services under one roof. No need to deal with insurance really, unless you needed surgery or were hospitalized.

Presumably some people in the condition of 116 preserve their worldview by deciding that they are bad and deserve to suffer. ...Then what?

76 et al: "The race is not always to the swift..." But my pejorist diagnosis is that we're inverting anti-aristocratic logic. Instead of thinking that we shouldn't have a privileged class chosen by luck (of birth), we correctly observe that we have a privileged class, and are eager for tokens of the luck that lets us in.

The best chapter, which incorporates Bugs' crossdressing proclivity, unique among the Looney Toons menagerie, and the operas, I would like to do that one, please. Elmer's bottomless capacity for hope and empathy in The Barber of Seville, the way he defeats himself with rage and hatred, these are the places to identify Jones' (that is, God's) approach to free will and to the doctrine of grace.

The story he recounts on page 13 of the excerpt suggests that maybe he isn't as lost as those two sentences suggest; he is writing a book after all about the badness of a belief that misfortune is divine punishment.

Tragedies like this were supposed to happen to selfish, dishonest people whom I, as a rabbi, would then try to comfort by assuring them of God's forgiving love.

Even in that conception of the world, and his conception of his role in it, both him and his god sound like shitheads. (Admittedly, he's writing this after he had an epiphany as to how that was wrong, but still.)

I had to login to see it. I don't have a ton of interest in defending the guy personally as I don't know his work, but I think that the fact that it seems to be a common experience for people not to fully understand the depths of a situation until they experience it suggests that maybe it's not a normal life stage achieved by all good people by 25. But I also believe based on past conversations that you and I are not likely to agree on this; I found becoming a mother to be transformative, you didn't etc. So, you know, people are different in their priors.

1) The world is not just or fair
2) Yet the world is good, or beautiful, or pleasurable, and WHWL is the best album
3) Wanting the world to be just or fair, or trying to make the world just and fair, or part of the world just and fair
3a) Will fail
3b) Demonstrates hatred of life and the world
3c) Generates envy and ressentiment of those who do like the world just fine often expressed as saying those who aren't suffering for this unjust unfair world lack empathy
3d) Is the source of religion, transcendental philosophy, greed, well, everything

The core belief being that Angra Mainyu (evil) and Ahura Mazda (good) are both powerful and locked in struggle until the world ends (at which point Ahura Mazda will win and everything will be awesome.)

136: I don't think heebie is denying the existence of deeply transformative experiences among people of good will. The rabbi's problem is that both before and after his transformative experience, he's peddling himself as an expert on these specific issues with special knowledge that the laity lacks.

Had you gone around telling people that you had special, God-given insight for people with children, then said ignorant and destructive things to people with greater knowledge, then had your transformative experience, I don't think you ought to be surprised if people view you with a certain amount of contempt.

147 and 136: I was totally curious about that transformation as well. It is still early days, but I wouldn't say that having a baby has transformed me. I am much the same, way happier, and have an additional set of needs/constraints to manage.